The first chapter of Andrew Breitbart's newly released book - and the wrongheaded world-view it sketches

In the opening chapter of Righteous Indignation, Los Angeles-based culture warrior Andrew Breitbart explains that his life's work is spurred by his grudge against Hollywood celebrities. "If America's
pop-cultural ambassadors like Alec Baldwin and Janeane Garofalo didn't
come back from their foreign trips to tell us how much they hate us," he
writes, "if my pay cable didn't highlight a comedy show every week that
called me a racist for embracing constitutional principles and limited
government, I wouldn't be at Tea Parties screaming my love for this
great, charitable, and benevolent country." He concludes by insisting
that "the left made me do it! I swear!"

It must be strange, for readers unfamiliar with Breitbart, to see an
adult man publicly admit that his worldview hinges significantly on the
pronouncements of a B-list actress and a Baldwin brother. Or that his
convictions about public affairs and love of country are so shallow that he'd stop touting them but for some unnamed comedy show. "If the college campus weren't
filled with tenured professors like 9/11 apologist Ward Churchill and
bullshit departments like Queer Studies," he writes, "and if the
academic framework weren't being planned out by domestic terrorists like
Bill Ayers, I wouldn't be expanding my Internet media empire to include
Big Education."

And it's hard not to pity the man. It isn't just that
he is misinformed about Ward Churchill being typical of tenured
professors - it's that he has built his whole professional life around
opposing what in reality is a paranoid delusion. Unfortunately, Breitbart inspires a lot of people to let umbrage and misinformation shape their
political attitudes. And that's a problem for all of us - conservative and liberal - who understand that anger at Hollywood celebrities and
radical academics is an imprudent foundation for any worldview, and
would remain so even in the face of insults from all four Baldwin brothers.

There are a lot of ironies lost on
Breitbart. The most glaring is his righteous indignation at celebrities
who trash people for their political beliefs. It isn't that he
doesn't have a point. Using mass media to insult half the country is idiotic. There's
just one problem. Breitbart is himself a minor celebrity. How does he
treat people with whom he has political disagreements? "I would not be
in your life," he writes, "if the political left weren't so joyless,
humorless, intrusive, taxing, anarchistic, controlling, rudderless,
chaos-prone, pedantic, unrealistic, hypocritical, clueless, politically
correct, angry, cruel, sanctimonious, retributive, redistributive,
intolerant..." In a single paragraph, he gives us the precise
behavior he claims to abhor in a form far more concentrated and extreme
than any single statement ever uttered by the people he criticizes.
Elsewhere, he goes so far as to call the American left "a ruthless, relentless,
shameless enemy."

This brings us to Breitbart's master narrative of American politics and culture. The man
possesses media savvy, so I'd hoped that at least some of his critique
would be on point, if wrapped in his usual bombast and factual
inaccuracies. Nope. Despite long experience
with the author's arguments, I found myself surprised by an iteration less grounded in reality than anything I'd previously encountered:

America is in a media war. It is an extension of the Cold
War that never ended but simply shifted to an electronic front. The war
between freedom and statism ended geographically when the Berlin Wall
fell. But the existential battle never ceased. When the Soviet Union
disintegrated, the battle simply took a different form. Instead of
missiles the new weapon was language and education, and the
international left had successfully constructed a global infrastructure
to get its message out.

Schools. Newspapers. Network news. Art. Music. Film.
Television. For decades the left understood the importance of education,
art, and messaging. Oprah Winfrey gets it. David Geffen gets it.
President Barack Obama gets it. Bono gets it. Even Corey Feldman gets
it. But the right doesn't. For decades the right felt the Pentagon and
the political class and simple common sense could win the day. They were
wrong.

So Breitbart thinks that there is no substantive
distinction - just a difference of form! - between the Cold War battle against the Soviets, on one hand, and the ideological battle pitting
Breitbart against Oprah Winfrey. (He also thinks Oprah, Bono, and President Barack Obama agree with this analysis.) Do folks in the conservative
movement find it discomfiting that an influential ally's core
analytic foundation is transparently idiotic? Surely even the most dedicated propagandists can agree that it's unhealthy for the base to be that disconnected from reality, if only because understanding the left helps in opposing it.

Another aspect of Breitbart's theory is that "the left does not win its
battles in debate. It doesn't have to. In the twenty-first century,
media is everything. The left wins because it controls the narrative.
The narrative is controlled by the media. The left is the media.
Narrative is everything." If you believe that, it follows that conservative victory depends on building an alternative
media, one that isn't concerned with argument so much as winning back the
narrative through some other means. (A constant feature of Breitbart is
that he tells you all about the terrible evils of something, and then
argues the only way to combat it is to build a right-wing
version of it, an approach that he never seems to recognize as
self-evidently immoral on its own terms.)

What I find strange is that lots of people on the right - almost the entire staff of National Review and all of Reason,
for example - passionately believe that engaging in reasoned argument is a crucial aspect of opposing progressivism. In other words, that reasoned debate does matter. But these
magazines are basically friendly to Breitbart, and never seem to object
when he operates as if the contrary is true. Insofar as people take his worldview seriously, it does grave damage to the right's
entire intellectual project. Isn't this mistake serious enough to
warrant direct, explicit push back, even against a supposedly valuable ideological ally? (That I am often alone in finding his influence on conservatism and libertarianism malign never ceases to amaze me.)

Given
his flawed premises, it's only natural for Breitbart to argue that the most
noteworthy and influential factor in handing the 2008 election to
Barack Obama was the support of Oprah Winfrey. Unmentioned is the
unpopularity of George W. Bush, the weak candidacy of John McCain,
public opinion turning against the Iraq War, the faltering economy - for
Breitbart, Obama won because the media wanted it that way, and they
have an apparent ability to brainwash the public. Can anyone think this a
healthy thing for marginally more people on the right to believe?

Breitbart goes on to tell the familiar story about how back in the dark
old days, before Rush Limbaugh jump-started the rise of conservative
media, there wasn't any talk radio, or Fox News, or conservative
bloggers, or any challenge at all to the "Democrat-Media Complex." In
this telling, the rise of alternative media represents "the successful,
better-late-than-never counterattack against the left's unchallenged
control of a center-right nation," a development that is the greatest hope for conservative resurgence.

It is convenient, if you're a right-wing Web publisher whose livelihood
hinges on ever bigger audiences consuming what you publish, to assert a
master-theory wherein media narrative is everything, the health of the
right-wing media complex is synonymous with the advancement of
conservatism itself, and what the conservative media counterattack needs
is "field generals, platoon leaders, and foot soldiers ready to storm
every hill on the battlefield." (Imagery fit for a commemorative gold
coin.)

But I have a question for Andrew Breitbart. If control of the American
media is what matters most, if it is the main factor in deciding
presidential elections, and controlling the media narrative through some
means other than argument is the key to conservative success in the
future, how do you explain 1980, 1984, and 2008? How is it that Ronald Reagan won the presidency and positively cruised
to re-election, even though Rush Limbaugh was working for the Kansas City
Royals at the time, cable news didn't exist, there was no Drudge Report or blogosphere, and all three news networks took their
cues from the front page of The New York Times?

And then in 2008,
when conservative media was reaching more people and making more money
than ever before, the radio waves filled with Rush Limbaugh imitators,
right-wing books topping the bestseller lists, Fox News the most popular
cable news network in America, Red State up and running at full tilt... how is it that Barack Obama won? It's
almost as if the success of conservative media outlets and ideological
entertainment isn't the basic driver of American politics. And that, as
it's presented in Chapter One, the core worldview of Andrew Breitbart is
easily refuted, bombastically phrased nonsense.

About the Author

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

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